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Erik: What role does government-relations play in what you do?
Slava: Well, we're actually really excited that we're partner with President Obama's
Startup America to help stimulate entrepreneurship in America. So, there's three major groups
of funding categories on Indiegogo. Number one is creative, number two is cause and number
three is entrepreneurial. So, within entrepreneurial it's really important to figure out how we
can work together. I mean, there's great case studies of entrepreneurial campaigns for example
Walk In Love, which went from a single designer who was selling t-shirts in a kiosk was able
to fund his campaign on Indiegogo and now has 15 employees in a Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Mall or two engineers in California that were turned down by 43 VCs were able to fund their
electronics product on Indiegogo and then got a $650,000 investor or a gluten-free bread
company that was able to start from her own kitchen and now be named by CNBC as one of
the Top 15 Startups in America. These are all examples of how people can use Indiegogo
today. In the future, there's the potential for the government shifting the law around
funding online and being able to allow for-profit investments, which would be very interesting.
Erik: And where does it stand today and, you know, what are the hopes for tomorrow?
Slava: So, this is very timely question actually just this week there was a new crowd funding
law that just passed the House of Representatives. So, that's actually two bills that have passed
in the house to allow crowd funding to become legal, specifically what that would mean is
that you don't have to be accredited investor, which means you don't have to have over a
million dollars of net worth and the actual entity raising the money would not have to
register with the SCC, which can be a very cost prohibitive process. The Whitehouse is
very much behind this proposal, which they've already said but the Senate has not weighed
in yet. So, really it's a matter of seeing what the Senate will see and if any of the
financial institutions that are lobbying against this will slow this down really allowing crowd
funding to become a for-profit opportunity will really bring in significant more liquidity
into the funding of entrepreneurial businesses and allow for many more jobs to be created.